“Man was created a bloody animal and I think he will always thirst for blood and will manage to have it. I think he is far and away the worst animal that exists; and the only untamable one” (Clemons). Clemons assumes that man was created evil and his nature will never come to cease, therefore declaring man the worst animal to exist. Humankind merely manages this behavior only until self control runs dry. Similarly, Joseph Conrad shows man’s innate evil in his novel, Heart of Darkness, when characters endure the gain and loss of moral reason. Through one man’s experience, he is able to unveil humankind’s intentions when no one is watching. In his novel, Conrad uses the literary elements of setting, character development, and symbolism to illustrate …show more content…
A very apparent symbol in the novel is the river on which Marlow and his crew travel to meet the highly anticipated Kurtz. However, Marlowe is unaware that the river’s path is deceptive. "But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land” (Conrad 18). The snake is representative of the evil and deceit the river holds. The further Marlow and his men travel on the river away from society, the more humanity he loses. He begins his journey with an ultimate goal of meeting the highly praised Kurtz, then quickly realizes that the job he thought he was fulfilling was secretly a mission to remove Kurtz from the island. Also, darkness was used to symbolize the journey into the innate evil heart of man. “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return.We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there” (Conrad). The darkness mentioned here is speaking to both the visual darkness that lies ahead of them as well as the darkness inside of them. This darkness fills the heart of man and the further away from society these characters get, the bigger the darkness